Just Write {55}

Ask for help.

She said, But how? How do you do that? 

It’s not supposed to be comfortable, you have to be in the discomfort. Let it be uncomfortable. Hi, how are you? Can you help me? 

Ask that person, the one who loves you so much and so purely that helping you is just fine with them or even better than fine. Like going to a movie or watching fireworks. That’s how people feel about it, you know. They like helping. It’s not pretend and they aren’t lying. Except those that are and if they’ve tricked you before and taken it back or acted put out, they were wrong and you were not. You were strong because it’s weak to carry it all alone. Sorry, but it is.  It’s also weak to pretend you like helping if you don’t. I’m not sorry for saying that. We all need to remember that. Me too.

Telling the truth is strong. And the truth is that you need help and so do I and so does that really confident and strong person with the beautiful hair and manicured everything.

Even she is us and we are her, under it all. We’re all a bunch of things that are both strong and weak.

I told her the truth then, I hate it too. I hate asking for help. I hate that I need help and I hate that I feel that way because I know it makes very little sense to hate what you need. You just need it. That’s that.

Then we talked about how it steals something from the other person, if you don’t ask them for help. Yes, we know, we said. We know the answers sometimes but struggle to live them out.

You would think that once you know something, it would be easy to simply live it. But it’s not. We should know that because of motherhood or marriage or any kind of relationship. We think, this is the healthy way to do it. Then we get up and walk away and different words come out of our mouths than we planned on.

So I don’t really know how to ask for help either. I have just learned, very slowly, the hard way, to do it.

I was supposed to know how to do Algebra after someone taught me too, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t work that way, or my brain didn’t or whatever. I still don’t. I have to try harder. I like not trying harder, but here we all are, trying to learn how to work harder.

It takes a long time and that’s okay.

Most of what we do and don’t do are habitual things. Hi, How are you? Oh…I’m fine….no nothing, I’m good, we lie. New habits are tricky. Be kind to yourself about it. As kind as you are to me, with a flower in your hair.

Ask for help. Take a deep breath and just do it. You know, like how you have to get ready before jumping in the cold cold water and you sort of start to tip forward and then you want to just not jump in, but you do. You have to just stop thinking and close your eyes tight and maybe flap your hands in front of you for a second and then you spring up and off and in and later you don’t really remember the drop to the surface, you just remember breaking through.

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This is the 55th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not written in the spirit of capturing moments–like lists or sponsored posts. Then please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in. (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.)

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